About Me

I was a reporter and columnist for 40 years for a chain of newspapers in the suburbs of Chicago. I'm a military veteran having served in the United States Army Combat Engineers (Cpl. E-4) and a Korean War veteran with an Honorable Discharge from the Armed Forces of the United States of America

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Charles M. Blow, op/ed columnist for the New York Times, puts his finger right on the reason why Sen. Barack Obama has not moved miles ahead of Sen. John McCain in EVERY poll.Personal friends of this blogger know I have been saying the same thing for months and months. There can't be any other reason why Obama remains stagnant in the polls than racism. All the other excuses pundits and anchors use to try and explain why Obama can't break away from McCain are pure. unadulterated sophistry.There are "closet racists" and there are "latent racists," but the bottom line is racism is "the elephant in the room" that nobody seems to want to look at.ABOVE COMMENTS BY BILL CORCORAN, EDITOR OF CORKSPHERE August 9, 2008Op-Ed Columnist

This is supposed to be the Democrats’ year of destiny. Bush is hobbling out of office, the economy is in the toilet, voters are sick of the war and the party’s wunderkind candidate is raking in money hand over fist.

So why is the presidential race a statistical dead heat? The pundits have offered a host of reasons, but one in particular deserves more exploration: racism.

Barack Obama’s candidacy has shed some light on the extremes of racism in America — how much has dissipated (especially among younger people) and how much remains.

According to a July New York Times/CBS News poll, when whites were asked whether they would be willing to vote for a black candidate, 5 percent confessed that they would not. That’s not so bad, right? But wait. The pollsters then rephrased the question to get a more accurate portrait of the sentiment. They asked the same whites if most of the people they knew would vote for a black candidate. Nineteen percent said that those they knew would not. Depending on how many people they know and how well they know them, this universe of voters could be substantial. That’s bad.

Welcome to the murky world of modern racism, where most of the open animus has been replaced by a shadowy bias that is difficult to measure. As Obama gently put it in his race speech, today’s racial “resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company.” However, they can be — and possibly will be — expressed in the privacy of the voting booth.

If the percentage of white voters who cannot bring themselves to vote for a black candidate were only 15 percent, that would be more than all black voters combined. (Coincidentally, it also would be more than all voters under 24 years old.) That amounts to a racial advantage for John McCain.

And this sentiment stretched across ideological lines. Just as many white independents as Republicans said that most of the people they knew would not vote for a black candidate, and white Democrats were not far behind. Also, remember that during the Democratic primaries, up to 20 percent of white voters in some states said that the race of the candidate was important to them. Few of those people voted for the black guy.

Some might say that turnabout is fair play, citing the fact that 89 percent of blacks say they plan to vote for Obama. That level of support represents a racial advantage for him, too, right? Not necessarily. Blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic in the general election anyway. According to CNN exit polls John Kerry got 88 percent of the black vote in 2004.

Anyone who believes the BS put out by the BUSH WHITE HOUSE and their puppet propaganda branch, FOX NEWS, that "the surge" has calmed things down in IRAQ is living in some kind of a dream world. Bombers have stepped up their attacks on U.S. troops all across Iraq, and one U.S. soldier was killed on Sunday.U.S. soldier killed as bombers target troops across Iraqhttp://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/08/10/iraq.main/index.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A U.S. soldier was among five people killed Sunday in a suicide attack north of Baghdad, a military spokesman said.

Twenty-four people, including two U.S. soldiers, were injured in the blast, Maj. John Hall said.A suicide bomber targeted a group in Tarmiyah, about 30 miles (50 km) north of Baghdad, killing the soldier and four Iraqis, he said.

The blast was one of several deadly explosions across the war-ravaged nation Sunday, an Interior Ministry official said.

Earlier in the day, a bomb exploded outside a bank in Kamaliya, a Shiite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, killing two people and wounding 10 others, the official said.

A suicide car bomb exploded outside a Kurdish security department in Khanakin town about 62 miles (100 kilometers) northeast of Baquba, killing three people and wounding 20 others, including Kurdish security officers and civilians, the Interior Ministry said.

Four separate bombings targeted Iraqi army patrols, the Interior Ministry official said:• A roadside bomb struck an Iraqi army patrol and a minibus carrying Finance Ministry employees. The blast killed three people, including a soldier and an employee, and wounded 10 others, including four soldiers and five employees.• A car bomb exploded at an Iraqi army patrol in al-Madaen, about 19 miles (30 kilometers) east of Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding five others.• A bomb went off over a bridge in Kadhimiya, a Shiite neighborhood in northwestern Baghdad. The blast wounded three soldiers, the official said.• A bomb exploded in east Baghdad's Zaiyuna district, wounding two soldiers and two civilians.